Richard says: This was a completely original interpretation of the life of Christ, and gave a fresh insight into the Gospels.

I listened to this last week, and was halfway through before I realized that I was listening to the abridged copy (the only one my library owns). It reads very much like an appendix to Miles’ phenomenal book on the Jewish God, which I had just finished, and I don’t think is worth even attempting without finishing that first.

I think this there was too much expurgated for this abridged to be a workable draft, and I look forward to actually finding a real copy at some point.

A must read!

A continuation of the author's project of taking the Bible rigorously as literature. In his first book, God: A Biography, he treated the God of the Hebrew scriptures as the protagonist of a single account. This book is in a way a sequel, recounting how one group, who came to be known as Christians, responded to the crisis referred to in the subtitle: the seeming non-fulfillment of God's promise to deliver Israel. They did so by acclaiming Jesus as the Son of God and viewing the crucifixion as a divine suicide, in Miles's opinion.
Miles presents his work as a response to a second crisis, that of modern biblical studies. It is one of two possible responses, the other being the attempt to uncover the history behind the story. Since the results of higher criticism leave the scholar with ever-less that can confidently be called historical, many universities have reconfigured their programs from "New Testament" to Christian Origins. In this way, all texts become once again relevant, since all, even those that might not reflect historical events, have what scholars call "Wirkungsgeschichte". But Miles's sympathies are not with this approach, but with the other possible response, which might be called "Bible as Literature". His image for contrasting the two is that one approach strains to see through the stained-glass window to see what's on the other side, while the other approach seeks to appreciate the glass itself. There have been several proponents of this second approach, but none before Miles to apply it not to individual books of the Bible, or even smaller units, but to read the entirety as a vast novel.
The result might offend those committed to a more traditional reading of scripture, while at the same time seeming uninteresting to those who have concluded that scripture is somehow irrelevant. But for those willing to engage the author on his own terms, the result is worthwhile.

”The world is a great crime, and someone must be made to pay for it. Mythologically read, the New Testament is the story of how someone, the right someone, does pay for it. The ultimately responsible party accepts his responsibility. And once he has paid the price, who else need be blamed, who else need be punished? The same act that exposes all authority as provisional renders all revenge superfluous.”

I truly think that this is the most metal line you could possibly include in the introduction to your book about jesus. jack miles is just out here on another level.

This is a brilliant book looking at the New Testament, mostly the gospels, from a literary point of view. Miles also wrote God: A Biography which looked at the character of God in the Old Testament and how he changes during the course of the scriptures. In Christ, God has come to a major crossroads in his covenant with Israel, and His need to make amends (Israel has been under oppression for centuries) leads to sending His son, here looked at through the guise of God Incarnate. The terms or the covenant change as well as the notion of what victory is and why. An absolutely fascinating book which I'm having my Literature of the Bible students read.

I’m really not sure what to make of this book and I don’t have a lot to say about it. It’s the stories of the gospel in a narrative format with some (perhaps?) controversial twists. For example, in the story of the talk Jesus has with the Samaritan woman at the water well, the author suggests that there is some provocative wordplay going on that may even have been scandalous in its historical context (a single man talking to married woman).

It seems that the author’s basic thesis is that God had a change of mind (or heart) about how to “save” people. Instead of just saving “his” people by restoring Israel to earthly prominence through battle, he decided to save all people by offering them the Kingdom of Heaven, not of this world, through sacrifice rather than triumph.

In a way, this sidesteps the problem of having to reconcile the “God of the Old Testament” with the “God of the New Testament,” as if they are different entities. The author reframes the problem by taking the position that it’s the same God who underwent a radical change of strategy.

Fantastic... this will reinvigorate your spiritual imagination.

In this book Jack Miles does what he did with god in his book God: A Biography on god and the Old Testament for god, focusing on Christ, in the New Testament. He describe the life of god as going through a crisis, involving guilt over how he dealt with his people in the Old Testament. His approach throughout the book is one of literary analysis. In other words he is not interested in the historicalness of the Bible per se, or does he take a theological perspective.

I have a few remarks on parts of the text that I would like to comment on. Page numbers are in brackets [] from the Alfred A. Knopf hardback edition of 2001.

[11] Miles quotes John 12:24: “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains but a single grain. Yet if it dies, it yields a rich harvest.” (presented in verse in the text) Jesus certainly did not know his biology. If the seed dies, it will not grow into a damn thing. Seeds are inert, but not dead.

[39] I like his metaphorical expression in response to Jesus saying at the Temple “Destroy this Temple.” (his italics) He says, “A lamb who taunts the butcher?”

[124] I could not help thinking in response to the women who “began to bathe his [Jesus] feet with her tears and dry them with her hair. She covered his feet with kisses and anointed them with the fragrant oil,” that the woman in the story had a foot fetish. The quoted portion comes from Miles’ quote of the story in Luke 7:36-50.

[310] After describing Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination as a case of Jew on Jew violence he claims “that the Jews did not get along in Jesus’ day any more than they do today.” I do not think Christians get along with Jews all that well either, then or now.

I thought the book was good overall. I like Miles’ literary approach; it allowed me to read the book without having the feeling that I needed to criticize the religious content. I also liked his line that Christ was the way that Yahweh could make amends for his bad behavior in the Old Testament.

If you are interested in a literary approach to the Bible, where the text is used to build a coherent story, you should like this book. If you are looking for a book on the legitimacy of the Bible, you maybe disappointed.

I liked this book because it gave me a better understanding of the New Testament and of Christianity. The author has a beautiful, clear writing style. He spends a lot of the book making his case that Christ was a crisis for God, and this becomes a bit tiresome. However, don’t give up; continue reading past the end of the book. In Appendix 2 he has a good overview of the evolution of thought about the Bible. Where we are now, appreciating its literature, seems to leave open the way for future interpretations.

This book was a more complex study than I desired. This is not light reading. It is possible to read this as a critique of how the historical Christ made a paradigm shift from the authoritarian and vengeful god of the Old Testament to the loving, merciful god of the New Testament, but this would be a simplified reading. This is a literary study of how the writing of the gospels made the paradigm shift regarding God. It is a detailed study of God as Christ (God Incarnate) and what this means and why - as a literary device - there had to be Christ and a resurrection. This interpretation of the New Testament as literature gives a deeper and more complex meaning to the figure of Christ and his words.

The author provides interesting interpretations of New Testament passages in their relation to Old Testament passages. These are thoughtful revelations keep the paradigm shift within Judaism and add complexity to the meaning of the New Testament. From my reading, the New Testament breaks from the past, but is not separate from the past.

With a hero (who isn’t always understood), betrayal, and redemption, I came away from this book understanding the Gospels as one of the great dramas of literature. The author’s interpretation of the Gospels enhances rather than undermining any theology.

For this reader, the most interesting section was “Interlude: The Roman SHOAH and the Isarmement of God” where the author explores the question “why did God become a Jew and subject ct himself to public execution by the enemy of his chosen people?” The author raises the intriguing idea that Jesus played a part in his own “mythologization” where he, as the messenger, “became the message,” “a provocateur who stimulated others to further provocation.” One of the paradoxes touched also here is the aspect of the “divine warrior” espousing pacifism.

It lives up to 'God, A Biography.' with a highly creative thesis that is quite consistent with his analysis of the "character" God in the first book. In both books, the author provides the reader with a view of the character "God" that strives to be a strictly literary character analysis rather than religious or theological analysis. In other words, he has approached the character "God" in both the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament as if he were analyzing the character Ahab in "Moby Dick." Anyone, atheist, agnostic, or committed Christian will benefit from this book. As this literary analysis is not intended to justify questions of faith and religious thought, it gives its readers many truly surprising insights about "what it means" to be God and then Jesus Christ in the piece of literature we call "The Bible."